alt Hacker News> I would suggest you are a fool if you think those listings aren't bought and paid for.
At no point in the process did ChatGPT direct me to any listings. I fed it my criteria, and it gave back a text response listing car models that met my criteria. The only links it included were links to reddit posts and other car reviews. And the results were useful to me because they pointed out where my own pre-existing biases had caused me to overlook one model that I probably should have paid more attention to.
What you are suggesting feels more like a potential future threat than my actual experience thus far.
I found the listings by conducting a separate search on a used car listing website - and the number of matches that met my criteria were small enough that I was basically able to look exhaustively through all the matches. But shopping for used cars can be a little confusing at times because there are a lot of different configurations that change every year. Sometimes the listing might just say something like "2022 Touring, Safety Package" and include a bunch of photos - and identifying whether a given listing has a particular feature you are looking for requires some investigation (ideally they would include a full list of options, but often times they don't). Or often times the listing itself might contain incorrect information. And I found ChatGPT to be a useful tool for quickly making sense of the various configurations, and of course conduct my own sanity checks to be sure the information is not hallucinated.
I'm not suggesting you should solely rely on AI for shopping (although in some cases for low-risk purchases it may be fine) - but rather as an additional tool to aid in research and decision making.
> What you are suggesting feels more like a potential future threat than my actual experience thus far.
Do we really have to litigate this? Have you been on the Internet at all in the last 2 decades? Do you seriously think that even if that kind of advertising vector isn't being paid for today, it won't be tomorrow?
It is almost childishly naive to assume that these companies that are bleeding billions will have the ethical fortitude to say 'no' to Chevy / Ford / Jeep / Whoever when they offer them a check to make sure Toyota and Honda are unceremoniously just de-prioritized as recommendations.
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Beyond that, the issue is still that you are not going to get complete market coverage. It's feasible that you might on certain smaller market segments (Cars, for example), but something with much more producers and products in the segment has no chance. You would be better off spending the time to understand the market, what differentiates the products in it, and how to think about the parameters involved - all things that are being just abstracted away by asking a Chatbot for a list of requirements.